The Long Chance Part 38

He found Mr. Hennage seated in the sand with his head and shoulders supported by a stranger.

Mr. Hennage smiled his rare, trustful, childish smile as the yardmaster approached.

"Good old Dan!" he mumbled. "He can only--think of one--thing at a--time--like a horse--but--by G.o.d--he thinks--straight. h.e.l.lo, Dan. I'm beefed. Help Bob--carry me in--Dan. I'm so--d.a.m.ned--heavy an' I don't want--any but real friends--to touch me--now."

They picked him up and carried him into the hotel, up the narrow heat-warped stairs and down the corridor to his room. On the way down the corridor, Mr. Hennage sniffed curiously.

"They got--new mattin' in the rooms" he gasped. "Business--must be--lookin' up."

The crowd followed into the room, and watched Bob McGraw and Dan Pennycook lay Mr. Hennage on his old bed. Dan Pennycook hurried for Doc Taylor, while Bob cleared the room of the curious and locked the door.

Mr. Hennage beckoned him to his bedside.

"I ain't paid--for this bed yet" he said, "but there's money--in my pants pocket--an' you square up--for the damage--an' the annoyance--"

The tears came into Bob McGraw's eyes as he knelt beside the bed and took the hand of the worst man in San Pasqual in his. He could not speak. The simplicity, the honesty of this dying stray dog had filled his heart to overflowing; for he was young and he could weep at the pa.s.sing of a man.

"Sho," said Mr. Hennage softly, "sho, Bob. It was low down--o' me to figure you--a crook, but the evidence--man, it was awful--but you--when did you--marry Donnie."

"Last October--in Bakersfield."

"I know--wisht you'd invited me--give the bride away, Bob.

This wouldn't--have happened. d.a.m.n dogs! They--say--little Donnie--belongs--east o' the tracks. I killed--O'Rourke for--thinkin'

it."

A knock sounded on the door, and Bob opened it, to admit Dan Pennycook.

"Doc Taylor's in Bakersfield" he said.

Mr. Hennage grinned. "I knew it--no luck to-day" he said. "Just wipe the--sand out--o' my eyes, Bob--an' let me kick the bucket--without disturbin' n.o.body. Dan'l, good-by. As the feller says--we shall meet--on that beautiful--sh.o.r.e."

Pennycook wet a towel in the wash-bowl and wiped Mr. Hennage's eyes.

Then he wiped his own, squeezed his friend's hand and departed. He had taken Mr. Hennage's gentle hint to leave him alone with Bob McGraw.

For nearly half an hour Bob and Mr. Hennage talked, and when the gambler had learned all he wished to know he closed his eyes and was silent until another knock came on the door. Again Bob opened it. Donna stood on the threshold.

"Oh, sweetheart!" she cried, and her arms went around his neck, while Sam Singer softly closed the door and stood guard outside. At the sound of her voice Mr. Hennage opened his eyes, but since he was not one of the presuming kind he quickly closed them again and feigned unconsciousness until he felt Donna's soft hand resting on his cold forehead.

"You oughtn't to a-come here, Donnie" he said, making a brave show to speak easily despite his terrible wounds. "There ain't--no fun in this--visit--for n.o.body--but me--"

He turned wearily to hide his face from her, and looked thoughtfully out the window, across the level reaches of the Mojave desert, to where the sun hung low over the Tehachapis. In the fading light the little dust-devils were beginning to caper and obscure the landscape, much as the dark shadows were already trooping athwart the horizon of Mr.

Hennage's wasted life. The night--the eternal night--was coming on apace, and it came to Mr. Hennage that he, too, would depart with the sunset, and he had no regrets.

"Don't cry" he said gently. "I ain't worth it. Just hold--my hand.

I want you--near--when I can't see you--no more--an' it's gettin'

dark--already. You're so much--like your mother--an' she--she trusted me. I was born with--a hard--face--an' n.o.body ever--trusted me--but you an'--your mother--an' I--wanted to be trusted--all my worthless life--I wanted it--"

He sighed and held out his hands to them. Thereafter for an hour he did not speak. He was thinking of many things now, and the time was short.

Presently he opened his eyes and looked out the window again.

"It's--dark" he whispered. "The sun ain't set, has it?"

"It's just setting" Donna answered him. He nodded slightly, and a flush of embarra.s.sment lit up his pale features. For the first and last time in life, Harley P. Hennage was going to appear presumptuous.

"If it's--a boy" he whispered, "would you--you wouldn't mind--would you--callin' him--Harley? Just--his middle name, Donnie--an' he could--sign it--Robert H.--McGraw."

Donna's hot tears fell fast on his face as she leaned over and kissed the death-damp from his brow.

"Oh-thank you" he gasped. "Bob--take off my--shoes--I don't--want--to--die--with--my boots--on. New--gaiters--too--give 'em--to Sam--Singer. Good--Injun--that."

The sun had set behind the Tehachapis now, and twilight was stealing over San Pasqual. It was time for Mr. Hennage to be on his way. He clung to the hands of his friends convulsively, and whatever thoughts came to him in that supreme moment were for the first time reflected in his face. Indeed, one tiny hint of the desolation in his big heart--the agony of a lifetime of misunderstanding and repression, trickled across his hard face; then something seemed to strike him very funny, for the infrequent, trustful, childish smile flickered across his face, the three gold teeth flashed for an instant ere the worst man in San Pasqual slipped off into the shadows.

And whatever the joke was, he took it with him.

In his una.s.suming way Harley P. Hennage had been sufficient of a personage, and the manner of his death sufficiently spectacular, to ent.i.tle him to one hundred and fifty words of posthumous publicity.

Within an hour after the street duel the local representative of the a.s.sociated Press had his story on the wire, and at eight-thirty next morning T. Morgan Carey, in his club at Los Angeles, read the glad tidings. By nine o'clock a cipher telegram from Carey was being clicked off to his tool in the General Land Office at Washington, instructing him to expedite the listing of the applications of Bob McGraw's clients for lieu land in Owens Valley.

To T. Morgan Carey's way of thinking that inconspicuous paragraph in the morning paper meant as much to him as the receipt of a certified check for a million dollars. Under his instructions, the applications of McGraw's clients had, with the judicious aid of the deputy in the State Land Office, been approved by the surveyor-general and forwarded to Washington for the approval of the Commissioner of the General Land Office. Here, Carey's long arm, reaching out, had stayed their progress until now. Within a week after Mr. Hennage's death the lands would be pa.s.sed to patent, under the interested attentions of Carey's man in the General Land Office, the State Land Office would notify Bob McGraw at his address furnished them that the lands were ready for him, and to call and pay the balance due. It would then be inc.u.mbent upon McGraw to visit the State Land Office, pay the balance of thirty-nine thousand dollars due on the lands and close the transaction.

The way had been nicely smoothed for Carey by the death of Mr. Hennage, who had warned him so earnestly to "keep off the gra.s.s." Of course, McGraw, being to Carey's way of thinking an outlaw from justice, would not dare to appear to claim the lands, and if he did, T. Morgan Carey planned to have a hale and hearty gentleman in a blue uniform with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, waiting at the Land Office to receive him _before he paid for the lands._ With the providential removal of McGraw's queer partner, Carey saw very clearly that, after waiting a reasonable period after due notice of the approval of the applications had been mailed to McGraw, the filings would eventually lapse, the state would claim the forfeit of the preliminary payment of one thousand dollars and the lands would be reopened for entry--whereupon Carey would step in with his own dummy entrymen. He could then proceed with his own system of irrigation, in the meanwhile keeping a watchful eye on McGraw's water right, ready to grab it when the t.i.tle should lapse through McGraw's failure to develop it.

Harley P. Hennage died on the fifth day of March. On the seventh there were two funerals in San Pasqual. The coroner and two Mexican laborers tucked Borax O'Rourke away in the potter's field in the morning. In the afternoon every business establishment in San Pasqual closed, every male citizen in San Pasqual arrayed himself in his "other" clothes and attended the funeral of Harley P. Hennage, testifying, by his presence at least, his masculine appreciation of a dead-game sport.

That was a historic day in San Pasqual. Harley P. lay in state in the long gambling hall of the Silver Dollar which, for so many years, he had ruled by the mystic power of his terrible eyes. Dan Pennycook had made all of the funeral arrangements, and when the crowd had pa.s.sed slowly around the casket, viewing Harley P.'s placid face for the last time, a strange young man, clad in the garb of a prospector, mounted the little dais, so long occupied by the lookout for Harley P.'s faro game, and delivered a funeral oration. It was not a panegyric of hope, and it dwelt not with the promise of a haven for the gambler's soul in one of his Father's many mansions. He told them merely the story of one who had dwelt amongst them--the story of a man they had never known--and he told it in such simple, eloquent words that the men of San Pasqual wondered what dark tragedy underlay his own life, that he must needs descend to mingle with such as they. And wondering, they wept.

They asked each other who this red stranger might be, but none could answer. But when Harley P. Hennage was finally consigned to the desert they watched the stranger and saw him walk down the tracks to the Hat Ranch. Then they understood, and the word was pa.s.sed that the man was Bob McGraw, the father of Donna Corblay's unborn child.

Strange to relate, n.o.body considered it worth while to telephone the sheriff of Kern county. Even Miss Pickett, who since the shooting had been strangely subdued, was not attracted by the recollection of the offer of a reward of five hundred dollars for Bob McGraw, dead or alive; and ten days after the funeral, when a registered letter came to Robert McGraw, she sent for Dan Pennycook, gave him the letter and the registry receipt and asked him to take it down to the Hat Ranch.

Pennycook leaned his greasy elbows on the delivery window and gazed long and sternly at Miss Pickett.

"Miss Pickett" he said presently, "we found a 'nononymous letter on Borax O'Rourke after he was killed. There's folks in San Pasqual that says the letter's in your handwritin'."

"'Tain't so!" shrilled the spinster.

"Well, this man McGraw says it is so, an' he's goin' to get an expert to prove it. He says it's a felony to send a 'nonymous letter through the United States mails. I'm just a-tellin' you to give you fair warnin'."

Miss Pickett, although greatly agitated, pursed her mouth contemptuously and closed the delivery window. Mr. Pennycook left for the Hat Ranch.

"Donna," said Bob McGraw, when Dan Pennycook had departed, after delivering the letter from the State Land Office, "the applications of my clients are approved and ready to be pa.s.sed to patent. I have been called upon to pay the balance of thirty-nine thousand dollars due on the land, and if there are thirty-nine cents real money in this world, I do act possess them. Will you loan me a hundred dollars, dear, from that thousand Harley P. gave you? I must go to San Francisco on business."

He smiled his old bantering smile. "I'm always broke, sweetheart. I'm an unfortunate cuss, am I not? Those claims of mine didn't yield wages and I was forced to sell my outfit at Danby to get railroad fare back to San Pasqual. And if the train hadn't been ten minutes late--if I hadn't gone into the eating-house looking for you--I would, have arrived in time to have saved poor Hennage. It was my fight, after all, and poor Harley wasn't used to firearms."

They were sitting together in the patio. Donna leaned her head on his broad shoulder. She had suffered much of late. She had fought the good fight for his sake, for the sake of his great dream of Donnaville, and she had fought alone. She was weary of it all and she longed to leave San Pasqual as quickly as possible.

"Are you going to ask Mr. Dunstan for the thirty-nine thousand dollars he promised to loan you, when the lands were ready for you?" she asked dully.

"No" he answered. "It's no use. I need more money, and Dunstan's check wouldn't even get me started. If I'm whipped, there is no sense in dragging my friends down with me. I'm going to Los Angeles and compromise with Carey."

She drew his rough cheek down to hers and patted his brown hands. She knew then the bitterness of his defeat, and she made no comment. She was tired of the fight. A compromise with Carey or a sale of the water right was their only hope, and when Bob spoke of compromise she was too listless to dissuade him. Since that eventful night when he had first ridden into San Pasqual she had been more or less of a stormy petrel; woe and death and suffering had followed his coming, and if Donnaville was to be purchased at such a price, the land was dear, indeed.